Paper Summary
The Synthetic Aperture (SA) method is one of the key techniques in remote sensing using radio frequency signals. During recent years this method has also been applied to low frequency electromagnetic (EM) fields used for geophysical exploration. This paper demonstrates that the concept of the SA EM method can be extended to rapid imaging of large volumes of towed streamer EM data. We introduce a notion of virtual receivers, which complement the actual receivers in the construction of the SA for the towed streamer data. The method is illustrated by imaging of towed streamer EM data acquired in the Barents Sea. Remarkably, imaging the entire towed streamer EM survey requires just a few seconds of computation time on a desktop PC. This result is significant because it opens a possibility for real-time imaging of towed streamer EM survey data.